House leaders express support for Syria strike

1of 2Secretary of State John Kerry, flanked by Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey (left) and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The panel agreed on a resolution that would allow the president to carry out a strike against Syria.Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

2of 2US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill September 3, 2013 in Washington, DC. Kerry appeared before the committee to present the Obama Administration's views on Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Syria. AFP PHOTO/Brendan SMIALOWSKIBRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty ImagesPhoto: AFP/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama won the support Tuesday of Republican and Democratic leaders in the House for an attack on Syria, giving him a foundation to win broader approval for military action from a Congress that still harbors deep reservations.

Speaker John Boehner, who with other congressional leaders met Obama in the Oval Office, said afterward he would “support the president's call to action,” an endorsement quickly echoed by the House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia.

The expressions of support from top Republicans who rarely agree with Obama on anything suggest the White House may be on firmer footing than seemed the case on Saturday, when the president abruptly halted his plans for action in the face of growing protests from Congress.

Tuesday evening, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed on a resolution that would give Obama authority to carry out a strike against Syria.

The resolution would permit up to 90 days of military action against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, beginning with 60 days and the option of 30 more pending Obama's notification of Congress, according to a copy of the resolution provided by Senate aides and obtained by the Washington Post. The resolution also bars the deployment of U.S. combat troops into Syria, but would permit the deployment of a rescue mission, in the event of an emergency, the aides said. Obama would be required within 30 days of enactment of the resolution to send Congress a plan for a diplomatic solution to end the violence in Syria, according to a Senate aide familiar with the agreement.

Shortly after that, Obama left for Sweden and Russia, where he will try to shore up an international coalition to punish Syria for a chemical weapons attack and will probably encounter some of the same debates that are cleaving the Capitol.

Before his departure, the White House intensified what has become the most extraordinary lobbying campaign of Obama's presidency as it deployed members of his war council and enlisted political alumni of his 2008 campaign to press the argument with the public.

“This is not the time for armchair isolationism,” said Secretary of State John Kerry, who answered sharp questions and defended the administration's strategy for Syria in nearly four hours of sometimes sharp exchanges before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Although he appeared alongside Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former senator, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Kerry dominated the hearings.

He seemed keenly aware of the echoes of Iraq.

“We were here for that vote,” Kerry said. “We voted. So we are especially sensitive, Chuck and I, to never again asking any member of Congress to take a vote on faulty intelligence. And that is why our intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence.”

Kerry said the intelligence proved that the “Assad regime prepared for this attack, issued instructions to prepare for this attack, warned its own forces to use gas masks,” and the intelligence included “physical evidence of where the rockets came from and when.”

Hagel warned that authoritarian governments with arsenals of unconventional weapons could transfer them to terrorist groups. He also underscored the threat to U.S. military personnel across the region if chemical weapons proliferated out of Syria.